For people looking at a selfie taken on their mobile phones and wondering how they could improve its quality, Adobe is offering Photoshop Camera, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven photo-editing app for iOS and Android.
Take a picture or use one from your folder, and Photoshop Camera will near-instantly analyze it and offer up a large selection of potential enhancements, from basics like adjusting the shadows and highlights, to more complicated changes such as swapping out the sky in a cluttered cityscape.
The AI-based app will recognize the content of the image — whether it is a food item, people or a landscape — and show the most relevant ‘lenses’ (filters) as options to enhance the photo. All lenses are are non-destructive, so you can quickly roll back any changes made.
Though the enhancements appear near instantaneously, the data powering the AI has been acquired over many years, using the hundreds of millions of stock photos in Adobe’s collection and correlating it with data on which of these photos people tend to buy and use. Perhaps most importantly, they have the tooling data on how photo editors take a picture and get it from point A to point B.
Some of the enhancement options made by the AI were astounding. For instance, it took a solid but basic landscape photo and made it look like something out of a nature magazine. It took a photo of food on a table and, in a split second, identified which parts of the photo were food and tweaked just those regions to make the colors shine.
Adobe is also understood to be working with artists to create custom filters and lenses. The only catch to using this app is that if you want to use it anytime in 2019, you will have to get be prior approved by Adobe, as it will remain in private ‘preview’ mode until sometime in 2020, when it is expected to roll out to everybody.